#kodathefox

Thanks so much @uhhleeshaw for sending me this healed pic of your pretty little fox Koda with the tattoo of her. She is so cute!!! 💖 #kodathefox

Got to finish this little fox today, thank you Alicia ♡ #kodathefox (at Str Body Modifications)

Do not repost or delete my caption. Both are rude.

I've tried to respond to this video in a number of ways but Tumblr keeps eating my posts. Here are my training feels on the subject: This is a classic example of reinforcing unwanted behaviors because "it's cute" or because "he only does this to me". We see it all the time in dog training. In positive reinforcement training, also known as R+, when you teach a behavior, you immediately reward that behavior. Teaching an animal to sit? Lure and reward immediately as the butt hits the ground. Only after the animal successfully completes this behavior many times do you add duration. You cannot go from 0 to 60, however. The duration of the behavior should only be extended by a few seconds with each couple successful completions. Training sessions in general should be kept short. Training simple behaviors such as sit can be done in a few sessions but adding duration, consistency, and longevity takes many successful sessions. In the video, it seems that you did not reward quickly enough. This caused Miko to jump up in either excitement or frustration. While this seems like a cute behavior, giggling and cooing at him are rewarding sounds that can encourage it to continue. Jumping up for food or other reward items generally becomes annoying and even dangerous if encouraged. Miko is not a poorly trained fox. There is always room for improvement, however. That said, it's really important that animal owners do not tolerant behaviors such as this. Jumping up can easily escalate to nipping at hands for food or biting at arms and legs to get you to drop the food (or other reward item). R+ training is almost always at work, even in simple interactions like this. Even though you with held the reward (for seemingly no reason? did he not preform the desired behavior?) you then encouraged poor behavior by giggling and allowing him to jump on you. In my opinion, the way to "correct" this is to go back and teach sit with length of sit in mind. Then, if he begins jumping up impatiently, walk away and do not give him a chance to practice the rewarding behavior of jumping. If you wanted to teach him to jump, I suggest teaching him to jump over an object or to "sit up" in a begging position. Those are much safer tricks to teach. You must reward the successful attempts to avoid the frantic, more assertive jumps towards the end of the video. Long story short: "Cute" behaviors can quickly escalate into dangerous behaviors. Be careful with rewards.